


Five Times Angharad Touched Furiosa and One Time Furiosa Touched Angharad

by fourthduckling



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, Falling In Love, Implied/Referenced Cannibalism, Past Rape/Non-con, Pre-Mad Max: Fury Road, Romance, love in brutal places, movie compliant at least
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:46:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24382270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourthduckling/pseuds/fourthduckling
Summary: Love is green and hardy, and can grow even in the darkest places. When The Splendid Angharad touches Furiosa, it wakes a seed inside her.
Relationships: The Splendid Angharad/Furiosa
Comments: 2
Kudos: 43





	Five Times Angharad Touched Furiosa and One Time Furiosa Touched Angharad

**Author's Note:**

> I realize I'm a million years late to post a story in this fandom, but I found it fully written in my drafts, and it still meant something to me when I re-read it. So here it is.

**one: sympathy**

“You lost a child.” Angharad says. It isn’t a question.

It isn’t a complete shock. Furiosa knows she was going to ask about it at one point or another. It just came a little sooner than expected. She didn’t answer, and instead turned her face away. Angharad could read into it what she wanted. 

“Sorry,” Angharad moves closer to her. She is barely showing-- the soft curve at her belly indicating a seed taking hold. “Not for thinking about offing mine.” She stops and looks out into the darkening room. “I don’t want to have a baby like Joe. Or his slag heap children.” Her lips thin when she tightens her jaw. 

Furiosa watches the light of the setting sun catch at the corners of the windows. Would it be better to have a dead child or one like Rictus? She only knew which would be better for the mother. 

Angharad suddenly turns to face her, face drawn. “What happens if it’s a girl?” she whispers, her voice falling dead in the hot air. “What does he do to girls?” Her eyes are wide. 

“Milk Mothers,” Furiosa says. The Lovely Amar’s last girl is one of the youngest, constantly heavy with the mutated children of the luckiest War Boys. “Usually,” she adds.

Angharad’s face twists and she reaches out, grabbing at the ghost of Furiosa’s left arm. “We can’t stay.” Her expression is hard and angry, but her eyes start to puddle with precious water. “One way or another, I will not let my child live this life.” 

“It will die out there. In here, it will have a chance at something. Water, food.” 

“We all die at some point,” Angharad said. She turns to go, fingers unclenching from Furiosa’s metal arm. “Might as well die free.” 

Furiosa doesn’t tell her about her own daughter, the single child she had birthed despite her best efforts. She’d been a squalling little ruin with a withered arm. But they’d run out of spots for Milk Mothers. She’d been exchanged to the People Eater for a liter of guzzaline. Furiosa’s arm had been worth two liters.  
  
  


**two: rot**

The disease spread quickly from Wretched to War Boy to Wife. No one knew where it came from before that, only that it ate you alive with fever and hallucinations. None were spared. Furiosa knows her own turn is coming, the dizzy sickness catching up to her. 

When Angharad had it, the Organic Mechanic had sat outside the room at all hours, recommending useless treatments like more water or more food. Joe had seen to it that she’d had everything, though he didn’t dare set foot in the room himself. Toast and The Dag were down for the count, both moving through worlds that no one else saw, screaming for people that didn’t exist while Miss Giddy tended to their needs. That was worst of all, worse than the actual fever-- the tortured sounds of others. She didn’t do well with that kind of thing.

Furiosa hadn’t lasted long in the branding pit. 

She remembers, though, the way the hot iron pressed to flesh on Immortan Joe’s property. She remembers the smell, and how it had turned her hungry stomach. It turns her stomach now, remembering, and she bends over, the world slanted and nauseating as if it’s happening right in front of her.

The next thing she knows, she is lying on her stomach , Angharad’s cool fingers on her face. “Miss Giddy! She’s sick.” 

“I’m fine,” Furiosa protests, trying to push herself up. It’s hard going, worse than moving against a storm, but she finally stands, swaying only slightly. “I’m fine.” 

“Sit,” Miss Giddy says, in a tone that brooks no argument. “If you fall over, you’ll be no good to anyone.” 

“I’ll be no good to anyone if I can’t guard you,” Furiosa says, and it takes all her concentration to stay on her feet. 

“We’ll see about that,” Miss Giddy says, pushing her back until she stumbles into a chair. The old woman pries at her eyes, looking for something. Then her bony wrist is on Furiosa’s forehead. “You need to sleep, girl.” It’s been a long time since anyone called her _girl_. “And drink.” This is what she hears before she collapses entirely. 

When she wakes, she sees her daughter, but Angharad is pregnant with her. Splendid Angharad with the cool hands who touches her face, her neck, her wrists. 

“Let me up,” Furiosa breathes, staring at the round stomach that contains… not her child, but Angharad’s own. 

“Sleep,” the other woman says. Her long hair falls over her temple, brushing Furiosa’s flesh shoulder. “Dream of trees,” she might have murmured. 

Furiosa does. She doesn’t know how long she’s out, doesn’t know the difference between moments except that sometimes the trees grow from her lungs, and sometimes she’s walking between the peach groves and the olive trees and the cedar from her home. Her mother is there, with Aliyah Sap, Molly Mudfeet, the Seedhound, and little Valkyrie. Sometimes there is water at her mouth and sometimes a pillow under her head. But best of all are cool fingers touching her brow. 

On the third day, the fever breaks, leaving her weak but not insensible. When she opens her eyes, Angharad smiles at her, a bare twitch of her lips. “Welcome back.” 

Furiosa watches her, mesmerized by the way she sits, the candlelight in her hair, her fingers flipping the pages of a book. She wants to cry, to scream, to believe in the lost dreams she’d just been in, but at least there was something in this world. At least there was Angharad. “Thank you,” she said and struggled against her desire for those cool fingers to rest on her forehead once more. 

  
  


**three: emergency**

It’s not as rare as it should be for a War Boy, drunk on imminent death, to break into the Vault. Usually all Furiosa has to do is stand between them and the Wives, reminding them that Joe’s property is not theirs. But on that day, it was different. 

The War Boy hadn’t listened. He was one of the old ones, stuck between Valhalla or the Wretched. If he had the guts, he would throw himself onto an enemy car to avoid the fate waiting him when he came back alive. 

“The preggo,” he breathed. “So Joe don’t know it was me.” He smelled like sickness, looked like death dragged up from the desert. 

In the ensuing scramble, Furiosa’s flesh arm was sliced from elbow to wrist in a slight curve. It was deep enough to cause blood to fountain out of her and fall, slick and red on the stone below. She didn’t notice until the War Boy was halfway down the Citadel by the fast exit, and her head started to feel light. 

Then Angharad is at her elbow, ripping the white linen from herself and wrapping it around Furiosa’s arm. Her grip is firm. “You shouldn’t have done that.” 

“It’s my job to protect you,” Furiosa says. Angharad’s head is bent towards her, so close that their breath mingles. She looks young at this angle, too young to be having a child and far too young to be bandaging a wound. 

“You are important, too,” Angharad says, looking up, the scars on the side of her face starkly white. 

“I’m an important weapon,” Furiosa says, her mouth twisting. 

“You are not a thing,” Angharad says emphatically. 

Furiosa finds, for the first time, that she actually wants to protect her.   
  
  
  
  
  


**four: companion**

They are let out-- with supervision-- among the green parts of the Citadel. Not the parts farmed by workers, but the parts that are close and lush with leaves. They pick fruit idly while watching plumes of dust rise from across the desert plain. Storm or spike cars, they didn’t know. 

Angharad sat next to Furiosa, their shoulders touching. The breeze picks up, hot and dry, but Furiosa doesn’t mind. Doesn’t mind Angharad’s warmth against her. The wives laugh at each other, dancing around the trees. Their warm skin glows with health. 

Furiosa feels Angharad’s head drop to her shoulder, soft hair falling over her skin and brushing the bits of her that are metal instead of flesh. She can’t feel those parts, but she imagines it, Angharad’s hair, skin, breath surrounding her. 

She’s been in love before. With a wife named Tall Slida. She’d had thick black hair, eyes so dark they looked black, and long, dark legs. But more than that, she’d been kind. When Furiosa was at her youngest and most vulnerable, Tall Slida had taken her in. Taught her to remove her mind from the situation. Kissed away her tears and told her to replace them with anger. 

She’d died, suddenly. No one knew what it was that killed her, but Furiosa was convinced she had died of pure rage turned inwards. 

Angharad is like her in her pointed fury. Her words are like arrows, sharpened to points. But Angharad, who hates the world, who hates Joe, who hates men loves her. Angharad is kind to her, kind to the other wives. Furiosa wants her for the Many Mothers. Wants her to be free, and to carry a gun and a sword. 

But more than that, Furiosa just wants her to be close. 

Furiosa moves her hand so that her fingers are over Angharad’s. 

  
  
  


**five: elegy**

“We’re living in the last days of humanity,” Angharad says. She’s picking at the piano keys, her long fingers plucking discordant melodies from it. Furiosa watches her do it, wondering what kind of a world would need an instrument like that. It’s heavy, nearly immovable, but unlike the war guitar, it would tip over easily if placed on the bed of a truck. “Maybe we’re the last.” 

“There’s Gas Town and Bullet Farm,” Furiosa says, “My people. The bikers in the mountains.” She’s sitting down and has to look through Angharad’s legs to see the sky outside, dark and peppered with a thousand million stars. The moon is big and bright.

“The world can’t support us any more,” Angharad says. “It’s dead.” Her belly is very swollen now. It will be a matter of a few months. “Why am I having a baby when everything is dead?” It’s too dark to see, but a sudden hitch in her breathing makes Furiosa think she might be crying. 

It wells up in her-- love, protectiveness, sorrow, anger-- a thousand feelings that amount only to one small sentence that tumbles out of her mouth. For the first time since her capture as a child, she speaks of home. “I know a place that’s green.” 

Angharad looks at her, face wreathed in shadow, hair haloed in moonlight. She sniffs. “What?” 

“My home,” Furiosa says. “To the east.” The memory of its scent fills her with sudden, deep longing. “It’s a green place. Women rule. The Many Mothers-- they’re strong and hard.” 

Angharad is silent for a few moments, but for noisy breathing. Then she wipes her arm across her face and says, her voice low and trembling, “Take me there.” 

“I can’t,” Furiosa says, but she says it quietly. Sorrowfully. “If he catches us…” 

Angharad leans down, her hands pressing to the sides of Furiosa’s face, warm though they look cool and blue in the moonlight. She draws close, her breath hot and sweet from the hardy mint she’d been chewing earlier. “I can’t live like this,” she says. “I won’t let my baby live like this. She won’t be me. He won’t be Joe.” 

“Please,” Furiosa says, but she hardly knows what she’s asking for. 

“If I can’t leave, I’ll die.” 

It takes forever for the word to work its way up through Furiosa’s mouth. But she finally says, “Yes.” 

Angharad hugs her close, and rests her forehead on Furiosa’s shoulder. “Thank you,” she breathes, and Furiosa’s shoulder is suddenly wet with her relieved tears. 

  
  
  
  


**plus one: escape**

The night before they escape, Angharad pulls Furiosa’s flesh hand into her own, tugging her up behind the little wall that led to the upper level of the room. They sit together, curled up and looking at the stars in the dark sky. No moon hangs that night, and the stars out the window are brighter than ever. 

“Would you help me?” Angharad asks finally, breaking the silence with her soft whisper. 

Furiosa turns to her. “Yes.” 

“I haven’t told you what I need help with yet,” Angharad whispers back, her smile shining. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Furiosa says. 

Angharad’s smile is a happy arc in the dim light. “Help me raise my son to be a good man.” 

Furiosa reaches out and touches Angharad’s swollen belly. “She could be a woman.” 

This is when Angharad leans over and kisses her. It’s a desperate, clumsy move based on Joe’s inept fumbling, but Furiosa finds herself just as desperate and inept. She kisses back, her flesh hand and her metal hand coming up to frame Angharad’s face as they kiss and kiss and kiss until they have to stop just to breathe. 

“I love you,” Angharad says softly. 

Furiosa kisses her again, leans against her so that Angharad leans back against her elbows and then on her back. They lie together, breathing the same air, seeing into each other’s eyes, and waiting for dawn. Inside Furiosa, something green and alive sprouts. 


End file.
